The best known health benefit of rooibos tea (pronounced ‘roy boss’) is that it is naturally caffeine-free.  Traditional black or green tea is made from the camelia sinensis plant which contains caffeine.  However, rooibos comes from the aspalathus linearis shrub, part of the pea and bean family, and has absolutely no caffeine in its genetic make-up.  This means that unlike decaffeinated black tea, it does not have to undergo any chemical processing to have caffeine removed.  Because rooibos has a full and rich taste, it can take milk, and therefore it makes a delicious alternative to black tea.  https://ticktocktea.com/blogs/ticktock-blog/rooibos-redbush-tea-benefits  See also https://time.com/3724505/healthy-recipes-healthiest-foods/ and https://time.com/4121973/the-50-new-healthiest-foods-of-all-time-with-recipes/ 

Marie-Helene Bertino on using humor to connect with readers.  June 16, 2021  During virtual readings last year, I was asked a few times how I incorporate humor into my writing.  While good alone, dark chocolate is perhaps most deliciously a delivery system for peanut butter.  When paired, chocolate and peanut butter become greater than the sum of their parts, forming a third entity, let’s call it a key--that unlocks a door to more profound flavors.  In the above relationship, if you replace dark chocolate with humor, peanut butter for The Thing, and flavors for Emotional Truths, it explains the access I feel being funny can grant.  Humor can make a reader relax.  This disorientation is valuable.  Once they feel at home, the reader is vulnerable.  Whatever the writer does next lands harder.  The reader might find the cozy room they’re sitting in is actually a lightning field.  Literary Hub’s The Craft of Writing 

WOULDN'T TOUCH IT WITH A TEN-FOOT POLE   "This expression may have been suggested by the 10-foot poles that river boatmen used to pole their boars along in shallow water.  In the sense of not wanting to get involved or having strong distaste for something, the words aren't recorded until the late 19th century."  From Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997).  Another reference has an earlier appearance of the phrase "I WOULDN'T TOUCH IT WITH A TEN-FOOT POLE" -- It's a dangerous or disagreeable, and I intend to avoid it.  The 'ten-foot pole' is not an item ready to hand, and neither is the 'barge pole' which figure in similar expression.  Still, they both serve as figures of speech, and so did 'tongs.'  With 'tongs' (spelled 'tongues') the expression was known by 1639, when John Clarke included it in his 'Paroemiologia Anglo-Latino':  'Not to be handled with a paire of tongues.'  Then 'ten-foot pole' was in used in the expression by 1758, the 'barge pole' by 1877."  From The Dictionary of Cliches by James Rogers (Ballantine Books, New York, 1985).  https://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/12/messages/29.html 

The "Great Moon Hoax" refers to a series of six articles that were published in The Sun, a New York newspaper, beginning on August 25, 1835, about the supposed discovery of life and even civilization on the Moon.  The discoveries were falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, one of the best-known astronomers of that time.  The story was advertised on August 21, 1835, as an upcoming feature allegedly reprinted from The Edinburgh Courant.  The first in a series of six was published four days later on August 25.  The articles described animals on the Moon, including bison, goats, unicorns, bipedal tail-less beavers and bat-like winged humanoids ("Vespertilio-homo") who built temples.  There were trees, oceans and beaches.  These discoveries were supposedly made with "an immense telescope of an entirely new principle".  The author of the narrative was ostensibly Dr. Andrew Grant, the travelling companion and amanuensis of Sir John Herschel, but Grant was fictitious.  Authorship of the article has been attributed to Richard Adams Locke (1800–1871), a reporter who, in August 1835, was working for The Sun.  Locke publicly admitted to being the author in 1840, in a letter to the weekly paper New World.  The hoax, as well as Poe's "Hans Pfaall", are mentioned by characters in Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon.  Nate DiMeo's historical podcast The Memory Palace dedicated an episode to the Great Moon Hoax entitled "The Moon in the Sun".  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax 

Tempest in a teapot (American English), or storm in a teacup (British English), is an idiom meaning a small event that has been exaggerated out of proportion.  There are also lesser known or earlier variants, such as tempest in a teacup, storm in a cream bowl, tempest in a glass of water, storm in a wash-hand basin, and storm in a glass of water.  Cicero, in the first century BC, in his De Legibus, used a similar phrase in Latin, possibly the precursor to the modern expressions, "Excitabat enim fluctus in simpulo ut dicitur Gratidius", translated:  "For Gratidius raised a tempest in a ladle, as the saying is".  Then in the early third century AD, Athenaeus, in the Deipnosophistae, has Dorion ridiculing the description of a tempest in the Nautilus of Timotheus by saying that he had seen a more formidable storm in a boiling saucepan.  The phrase also appeared in its French form "une tempête dans un verre d'eau" (a tempest in a glass of water), to refer to the popular uprising in the Republic of Geneva near the end of the eighteenth century.  One of the earliest occurrences in print of the modern version is in 1815, where Britain's Lord Chancellor Thurlow, sometime during his tenure of 1783–1792, is quoted as referring to a popular uprising on the Isle of Man as a "tempest in a teapot".  Also Lord North, Prime Minister of Great Britain, is credited for popularizing this phrase as characterizing the outbreak of American colonists against the tax on tea.  This sentiment was then satirized in Carl Guttenberg's 1778 engraving of the Tea-Tax Tempest, where Father Time flashes a magic lantern picture of an exploding teapot to America on the left and Britannia on the right, with British and American forces advancing towards the teapot.  Just a little later, in 1825, in the Scottish journal Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, a critical review of poets Hogg and Campbell also included the phrase "tempest in a teapot".  The first recorded instance of the British English version, "storm in teacup", occurs in Catherine Sinclair's Modern Accomplishments in 1838.  There are several instances though of earlier British use of the similar phrase "storm in a wash-hand basin".  See similar phrases in other languages at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_in_a_teapot  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_a_mountain_out_of_a_molehill   

"Makes the Whole World Kin" is a short story written by O. Henry (a pen name for William Sydney Porter), published in 1911.  In 1962, Leonid Gaidai made a feature-length film Strictly Business, made up of three short stories based on O. Henry.  The second segment was "Makes the Whole World Kin".  In 2009, Sanzhar Sultanov adapted the screenplay into a modern-day version of Makes the Whole World Kin.  In William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Act III, Scene iii - Ulysses, speaking to Achilles says that "One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makes_the_Whole_World_Kin   

babbitt  noun  (countable and uncountable, plural babbitts)

Short for babbitt metal, Babbitt metal (“a soft white alloy of variable composition (for example, nine parts of tin to one of copper, or fifty parts of tin to five of antimony and one of copper) used in bearings to diminish friction”).  quotations ▼

Synonyms:  (rare) Babbitt's metal, bearing metal

Alternative forms babbit (nonstandard)

babbitt  verb  (third-person singular simple present babbitts, present participle babbitting, simple past and past participle babbitted)

(transitive) To line (something) with babbitt metal to reduce friction.  quotations ▼  Alternative form  babbit (nonstandard)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/babbitt#English

 The American inventor Isaac Babbitt, after whom the alloy is named, was born July 26, 1799.   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2395  July 26, 2021